Original Letter

France

29th Nov. 1917.

My Dearest Maidie:–

There isn’t anything a very heap startling doing to-day – it was just an ordinary drab kind of a day until your letter came with its clipping from “Country Life” and your remarks thereon. You size things up neatly and concisely but I shall never “durn the Yank”. I think that we need them badly and perhaps before the end shall need them worse still. Gerard is trying to throw a scare into his people to waken them up. Belloc took up his twelve million men story in the last “Land & Water” I had before I left Rouen and tore it to pieces Of course that is not proving that there is no truth in Gerard’s statements Bill Leicester declares that England by having Free Trade is responsible for the war, and marshals a convincing array of facts to prove it. But the fact remains that Free Trade did not develop until long after 1841 and before that even this war was being planned. I think therefore that Bill still looks at the thing through the eyes of a politician. And probably politics more than anything else is responsible for this holocaust. If in every country the men in power had had clear vision and common sense, had had the interests of the people at heart instead of trying to further themselves – if this sort of thing had prevailed I am sure that there would have been no war. Personally I am ‘agin’ politics and question very much if the men who let their whiskers grow and throw bombs aren’t the true pilots. Some times I really try to figure this out satisfactorily, but what’s the use. I often wonder too if one would be any happier or satisfied if one did know absolutely every detail every motive that actuated the starting of the war. I rather think that it is better as it is.

Well, anyway that is a minor detail. The big worry that worries me twenty four hours per day is that I am away from you. Now why should that be? That is the most irrational (is there any such word as irrational?) thing in all this irrational world. I want you, Dearest, I want to look into your wonderful eyes and try and read the miracles in them. I want to listen to your voice to love you and to be loved. Your letters are beautiful and bring you very close to me I know you love me ever so but I want to be with you, I do, and I don’t care what anyone says so there! I do adore you to-day, my own Maidie. I just don’t do anything else.

Your own

Ross

[On the back of the page above, this is written:] You know I think that a great scheme about the Christmas Cards. Please do send me a list.

Ross

the men who let their whiskers grow and throw bombs

Note

Ross is presumably alluding to the anarchist movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

[A]narchist thinkers such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1853) and Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) concluded that all forms of government have been used as instruments for establishing monopolies that favor the propertied and privileged. Anarchists also argue that the all-encompassing authority of the state allows it to exercise undue influence over the lives of its citizens. It is further maintained by anarchists that the state, using law and the organs of power at its disposal, can control not only citizens’ public and private behavior but also their economic lives. As such, the state, in all its forms, is condemned as an unnecessary evil.

While the anarchist philosophy does not inevitably lead to violence, the association of anarchism and violence was strongly engrained in the popular imagination:

Beginning with the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 and continuing up to the turn of the century, when the American president William McKinley was murdered in 1901 by a lone gunman, anarchists everywhere were viewed as sociopaths who terrorized society by throwing bombs and assassinating heads of state.

The association with whiskers is harder to explain, but the photographs of Mikhail Bakunin, Ricardo Flores Magnon, Peter Alexeyovich Kropotkin, Emiliano Zapata, Enrico Malatesta, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Nestor Ivanovich Makhno, and others — even Henry David Thoreau — on the webpage below may go some way towards demonstrating the reason.

twelve million men story

Note

The article (entitled "The Military Situation") in which Belloc debunks Gerard's claims that Germany had at its disposal 9 million "effectives" (Ross was mistaken about the number; it is nine not 12) is found on p. 8 of the August 16, 1917 issue of Land & Water, a PDF of which is provided below. (Click on the thumbnail to enlarge.)

(The portion of the article dealing with Gerard's "9 million effectives" claim comes at the end of the article at the bottom of p. 10.)

remarks thereon

Bill Leicester

About Lieutenant William Frederick Leicester

It sounds as though Bill Leicester is someone that Mary and Ross both know—perhaps a friend from Canada before Ross and Bill enlisted. Since Bill enlisted in Swift Current, where, his Officers' Declaration Paper tells us, his wife lives, this seems likely: Swift Current is only 35 km from Rush Lake, where Mary and Ross lived for a time.

Like Major Graham, Bill appears to have been an active member of the military before the war (the documents Library and Archives Canada has on file for them are Officers' Declaration Papers rather than the Attestation Papers filled out by men who were enlisting for the first time - and neither Bill nor Major Graham seems to have a regimental number, which all men were assigned upon enlistment).

See the photograph of Mary and Bill with some other officers. (Mary is second from the left and Bill second from the right.) Note Bill's height, which Ross remarks upon in his letter of Nov. 23, 1917 ("Bill is so long — !").

Belloc

Note

Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953), a French-born writer who became a naturalized British subject, was “one of the most prolific writers in England during the early twentieth century” (Wikipedia) and a larger than life personality. Belloc was, apparently, “a zealous propagandist during WWI” (Columbia World of Quotations) and is quoted as having said, “It is sometimes necessary to lie damnably in the interests of the nation.” From 1914 to 1920 he was the editor of Land & Water magazine, which Ross reads with such enthusiasm.

Rouen

Rouen served as a base for the British Army in France. Since the Canadians were under British Command, some of the Canadians' administrative offices were also in Rouen.

Ross was stationed in Rouen from approximately March 1916 to August 1917, at which point he was transferred to the front. It seems that his role in Rouen was an administrative one.

It is unlikely that Mary was with him in Rouen, since enlisted needed to make special requests to be with their wives. We learn in the letter of Nov. 2, 1917, however, that his request to have her stay there was approved — after he was transferred to the front.